airplay

Today HTC made its latest flagship official. The HTC 10 is a 5.2-inch quad HD update with the company's trademark metal design. You get a Snapdragon 820, 4GB of RAM, a 12MP camera, and a 3000mAh battery. You also, it turns out, get compatibility with Apple AirPlay.

This information is on display on the tech specs section of HTC's pre-order page.

I had the opportunity a couple of years ago to review the V5PF (Play-Fi) Wireless Speaker from Wren. The sound quality was absolutely immaculate, and everything about the physical product more than justified its fairly high price tag. The one unfortunate dark spot in the nearly perfect experience came from software – an Android app built by DTS to run its proprietary Play-Fi protocol. It was ugly, amateurish, and unreliable. Two years have passed, and Wren has released the V5US, a new model that not only fixes some minor issues from previous products, but it also combines the features of its three existing variants to produce a single speaker with support for Play-Fi, AirPlay, and Bluetooth.

DoubleTwist's unique Android music app has been able to stream audio to Apple's AirPlay standard for some time, and to Qualcomm's competing AllPlay WiFi speakers since May. But for some reason, the company's Pandora-style streaming music service Magic Radio wasn't included. They have now corrected this oversight, and the latest version of the DoubleTwist app on the Play Store can now stream Magic Radio to AirPlay or AllPlay devices. You'll need the $8.99 upgrade to access streaming.

DoubleTwist can connect to multiple AirPlay and AllPlay outputs, selectively streaming to any of them with the app's built-in interface. The original feature of DoubleTwist, automated music syncing to and from desktop computers, remains in place.

The doubleTwist developers have introduced the ability to stream Google Play Music to AirPlay devices using MagicPlay, their own personal means of streaming music from Android to an AppleTV or AirPlay-compatible speakers. The process taps into the same API that Google uses to stream to the Chromecast and that which Sonos uses for Google Play Music to stream to its devices.

A new app just hit the Android Market that helps bridge the gap between Google TV and iDevices that use Apple's Airplay technology. The app is called Airtight, and it allows you to stream non-DRM movies and images directly to your GTV. In its current state the app cannot stream DRM content or music, but the developers note that they are working on support for the latter.

The app will only set you back $0.99, so if you have both an iDevice and Google TV, it's definitely worth grabbing. Hit the widget to make it yours.